Google has announced the release of the first beta build of 64-bit Chrome for Mac. Earlier this month saw Google add 64-bit support to Chrome Canary for OS X, the experimental build of the Chrome web browser.
MacRumors notes that Google says 64-bit support for Chrome will bring several speed and security improvements to the browser, in addition to decreasing the amount of memory it uses.
64-bit Chrome has become faster as a result of having access to a superior instruction set, more registers, and a more efficient function calling convention. Improved opportunities for ASLR enhance this version’s security. Another major benefit of this change comes from the fact that most programs on a modern Mac are already 64-bit apps. In cases where Chrome was the last remaining 32-bit app, there were launch-time and memory-footprint penalties as 32-bit copies of all of the system libraries needed to be loaded to support Chrome. Now that Chrome’s a 64-bit app too, we expect you’ll find that it launches more quickly and that overall system memory use decreases.
Google added 64-bit support for the Windows Chrome beta in July, and a stable release followed a month after.
